foo@example.com and Name <foo@example.com> are equivalent email addresses, so
darcs show authors should combine them, add together their patch counts, and use
the latter for display.

This would be easy to implement, but have you seen the .authorspellings
mechanism?  See the darcs darcs repository for an example use.  Maybe it's best
for darcs not to be clever about this and just have users rely on
.authorspellings instead.  This would just be a matter of keeping darcs as
simple and stupid as possible.

No, I hadn't seen that - thanks. However, this would make maintaining the
.authorspellings file easier.

Note that people could still share the same email address and be
distinguishable authors, by both prepending their names to their shared email
address.

This is a tentative wont-fix (see discussion on
http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2009-November/022044.html ) due to
the corner case that Robin helpfully pointed out. (thanks! I wouldn't even have
considered that people might share email addresses or change names, which I may
be doing by next year, incidentally)

--Eric Koe

Op zondag 01 november 2009 11:36 schreef Eric Kow:
> --Eric Koe

"Koe" is "cow" in Dutch :-).

Reinier

I agree that show authors could be a little smarter. A while back I felt it could 
automatically infer 80% of what we currently specify in .authorspellings, possibly 
making the latter unnecessary. I have some unfinished work on this, let me know if 
you want to help.